This site is designed to be a forum for news on in the document imaging, information capture, and enterprise content management industries. It's edited by Ralph Gammon, publisher of the Document Imaging Report, and an analyst of these markets. After almost 20 years, the document imaging market is finally reaching maturity and being subsumed into the world of more general IT applications. This makes it a very exciting time to be involved with the industry.

The IKON deal represents probably the largest acquisition yet by a hardware vendor of a dealer. IKON is more than twice the size of Global Imaging, which was acquired by Xerox last year. Also, vendors like Sharp and Toshiba have been acquiring smaller North American dealers over the past few years, Sharp only recently accelerating its activity in this area.

Of course, the big question is, where does the IKON acquisition leave Canon, which for years has been IKON's primary hardware vendor. Ricoh and HP have begun to figure more heavily into the IKON mix in recent years, but Canon was still the primary vendor. Canon, which has been the North American market leader in MFP units shipped will be hard pressed to replace this channel as it moves to Ricoh.